Wolfenstein: Yet another game that gives the
finger to the deaf/hard of hearing

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I typically play with subtitles on so I can get through cutscenes faster (assuming they have dialogue skip). And while the company isn't required to accommodate people with disabilities, it certainly doesn't hurt. If Netflix can get s*** for not having subtitles on some of their products (I believe Daredevil didn't have them when it first launched), why shouldn't Zenimax?

I went to a college that had a 10% deaf and hard of hearing community, and I can understand the frustration of not being able to enjoy something because there aren't any subtitles. Hell, my wife and I tend to have subtitles on when we watch streaming shows because of how muffled some of the people speak, and we both hear just fine.

that was legit question,i wasn't being condesending or anythingthe game defaults to foreign only subtitles and i was putting it forward as a possibility it was set to that instead of always on

That's very close minded of you. It's a very shallow viewpoint to have in a game where so much has been placed on the story.

Yes it does, the dialogue that I could make out was quite good, and really really really added to the atmosphere. What I can make up of the story is really good too, and I like It makes it feel like so much more than a mindless action game and nothing but

I also can't enjoy just about anything, game or otherwise if I don't care about the story in itself.

Some time back (maybe 2004/5) I worked with a bloke who was deaf and a gamer, and like me he loved first and third person shooters, and he told me how bad many games were when you were deaf. That made me curious, so I deliberately spent a week playing games with no sound (the speakers turned off), just to see what it was like. I knew it would be bad, of course, but I stuck with it and it was worse than I thought it would be. The lack of game music wasn't so bad, that didn't bother me much at all (but then I've never been a big fan of music), but the lack of ambient sounds really hurt the atmosphere.

Much, much worse was how little help games tend to give deaf people. First of all, it surprised me how few games actually had subtitles. That was bad enough, but that was only for the story, mainly. I hadn't realised (I had no cause to) that most first person action games make no allowance for deaf people as far as the game mechanics go. I mean, when you can hear, then you hear (through the game) roughly where an enemy is (at least, with stereo speakers you know roughly where, and surround sound is much better), and you can hear sudden gunshots that alert you to the fact that someone has started shooting in your direction. Lots of first and third person shooters have enemies who, when they see you, shout "There he is", or similar, which also alerts you to the fact that you're not alone and the enemy has seen you.

And in a Thief style game, then you can hear footsteps which alert you, and when you're hiding, then the footsteps get louder when the enemy approaches. Plus stealth games make your own footsteps louder the faster you move, but when you're, say, near in-game machinery that makes a lot of noise, then you can safely run or make as much noise as you like since the enemies won't hear you because any sounds your in-game character might make are drowned out by the very loud machinery.

But I can't remember even one first or third person shooter offhand, that offers an option of an onscreen display that points an arrow or other indicator towards the direction(s) where sound is coming from, for the deaf gamers. It doesn't have to be extravagant or anything major, just something in one corner of the screen that display an arrow at the direction of the sound, with either text or the arrow itself being colour coded to let you know if the sound is gunfire, or an explosion, or a shout, or footsteps. And maybe the larger the arrow (or the darker red, or something) the louder or closer the sound that caused it.

Playing a first person stealth game like the Thief series must be pretty bad for most deaf people, unless you have the option of such onscreen visual representation of sounds. And by now, you'd think there would be all sorts of help for deaf gamers. My own hearing isn't fantastic, and I sometimes put of subtitles to help me follow the speech, especially if the in-game speech isn't always clear due to the in-game sounds being as loud as the speech.

I'm a PC and console gamer - I love good games, regardless of their host system.For all things N64: http://z9.invisionfree.com/Nintendo_64_Forever/

But I can't remember even one first or third person shooter offhand, that offers an option of an onscreen display that points an arrow or other indicator towards the direction(s) where sound is coming from, for the deaf gamers.

Not a shooter, but I recently started playing Minecraft again to kill some time and I was amazed that it actually had such a feature. It hadn't actually occurred to me beforehand having onscreen help for the hard of hearing but when I saw it in Minecraft, I thought it was a cool idea and the implementation is quite decent, too: you a subtitle stile thing about WHAT you're actually hearing, e.g., "zombie groan" or "bat flying", etc., as well as the direction where it's coming from.

I think this is a good way to do the sound indication. Well, for Minecraft, at least - an FPS would be a lot more frantic so you probably need a different style of pointers that are faster to process and understand but it definitely would be doable.

We do what we must / because we can. / For the good of all of us. / Except the ones who are dead.

This reminds me of the Sierra adventure games when they started getting voices. King's Quest 5 was the first game that made me angry: if you had the CD-ROM version, you could NOT enable subtitles. Same with King's Quest 6. What offended me even more when I found out that the games HAD the subtitles files in there, but you could not see them if you enabled voices. So if I wanted subtitles, I had to DISABLE the voices.

And then King's Quest 7 and Woodruff were released. They looked like amazing games. I loved them, actually... Except for the fact that they didn't have subtitles AT ALL. The games REQUIRED you to understand the voices perfectly, because subtitles didn't work even if you disabled the sound.

And then we get to The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery. Not only that game had NO subtitles either, the actor chosen to be Gabriel Knight had a horrible diction. I played the game and loved it, but I failed to understand half of what he said.